


Cat Magic

by gingertart50



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Humor, Possibly Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 18:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1657754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingertart50/pseuds/gingertart50
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written pre DH for HP FunnyFest 2007. Requestor: cnary_crem_dght; Claim: Snape adopts 23 cats; Summary: Severus Snape discovers that he likes cats, but only in moderation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cat Magic

Severus Snape had not always liked cats. Indeed, he could recall more than once venting his rage on Mrs Norris when the mangy old moggy had to be pretty fast on her feet to avoid a good kicking. One single incident changed his attitude towards felines forever.

oooOOOooo

Snape looked at the wand pointing to his heart, swallowed and wondered how much Avada Kedavra was going to hurt. The Dark Lord sneered.

“Traitor!”

“Yes,” replied Snape, because he was a Slytherin but he was not a coward, whatever Potter said, and he might as well go out with his remaining shreds of pride. The Dark Lord took in a breath. Snape comforted himself with the thought that at least it had taken the most powerful Dark wizard of the age to bring him down. Then he was staring at Voldemort in a ginger-striped hat.

Except that it was a spitting, snarling bundle of fury intent upon removing the Dark Lord’s scarlet eyes from his skull. Voldemort yelled, staggering around and groping at the furious fur-ball on his head. None of the Death Eaters could do anything because a curse aimed at the cat would more than likely hit Voldemort instead. Then a pale grey streak shot between Snape’s feet and launched itself at Voldemort’s crotch. The Dark Lord shrieked. Snape dived for the floor and tucked himself behind a sofa, although he was unable to look away.

“Good one, Crookshanks!” shouted a horribly familiar voice. “Minerva, look out!” The grey tabby and the ginger half-kneazle both let go and hurtled for the nearest cover. Potter took aim and spoke very softly.

“Avada Kedavra.”

Which was how Snape had a grandstand view of the Dark Lord’s ultimate demise while the headmistress of Hogwarts perched upon his head and a ginger tomcat pissed into his left boot.

oooOOOooo

 “According to the dunderheads at St Mungo’s, you’re suffering from shock, or even Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” Snape remarked. “Myself, I think you’re just lazy.”

 “Mew.”

“Not that I entirely blame you; I wouldn’t want to go back to Hogwarts either. I’ve had enough of spotty, hormonal adolescents to last me a lifetime, thanks very much.”

“Mew.”

“But don’t you want to be Headmistress?” He cocked an eyebrow. “I realise that Dumbledore is a hard act to follow but I’m sure that the rest of the staff will support you just as faithfully as we all supported him.”

“Meep.”

“Ah, yes, sorry; I did, didn’t I? Well it was at Albus’ own insistence. I can assure you that I have worked it all out of my system.” Snape poured himself a cup of tea. He looked at the cat, sitting regally with her tail around her front paws and her bright orange eyes fixed upon the milk bottle. He sighed, tipped milk into his saucer and placed it on the floor. She began lapping with dainty efficiency. Snape fingered the packet of chocolate Hobnobs and wondered if he could get away with dunking one in his tea or whether she would give him one of her Looks. Not that they were quite as effective coming from a small, domesticated carnivore with whiskers and a habit of pointing its anus at anyone it disapproved of, but McGonagall had been his professor for seven years and his deputy head for longer than he cared to recall.

“Mrr-rowr.”

Snape stared at the open back door. It framed his small, weed-infested yard, a battered dustbin and a very large, very furry ginger tomcat. A half-kneazle tomcat to be precise.

“I thought you were Granger’s familiar?”

“Mrrrup,” stated Crookshanks and marched in with the unstoppable determination normally only achieved by very large rhinos, very small children and cats. Minerva moved to one side and he joined her at the milk bar. Somewhat bemused, Snape obeyed the urging of two pairs of hot yellow eyes and refilled the saucer.

oooOOOooo 

_Spinner’s End_

_Miss Granger,_

_Although I shall always be cognisant of the debt that I owe to your cat, with regard to his ability to distract psychopaths with paranoid delusions from casting unforgivable curses at my person, I am nevertheless becoming somewhat aggravated by his habit of urinating in my boots. Kindly remove him at once._

_Yours,_

_S. Snape._

 

_The Burrow_

_Dear Professor Snape,_

_Thank you for your owl. I did wonder where Crookshanks had got to and I’m grateful to you for letting me know. Please can he stay with you for the next few months? Ron and I are now the proud parents of two gorgeous baby boys (Marcus Harry and Matthew Arthur) and we are hoping to move into our own place as soon as Ron, Harry, Fred and George have finished renovating. The infestations of ghouls, doxies, knarls, horklumps, gnomes and bundimuns have taken a lot longer to sort out than we expected._

_By the way, my name is now Granger-Weasley and has been so for the last two years._

_Thanks for looking after Crookshanks, I’m sure he didn’t mean to have an accident in your boots. I’ll let you know by owl when we are ready to have him home._

_With kind regards_

_Hermione Granger-Weasley._

oooOOOooo

Fed up with being woken by the persistent and pathetic noises made by a cat that is on the wrong side of a closed door, Snape put up anti-burglar wards and took to leaving the kitchen window open. He was not entirely surprised to come down one morning and find Crookshanks looking very pleased with himself while a strange white, longhaired cat with blue eyes and a pouty face sat on the draining board. Even in feline form, Minerva was still a strait-laced old biddy. Her frosty demeanour must have repelled Crookshanks’ amorous advances. Not so the new arrival, who positively fawned on the mangy reprobate. When Snape lifted her from the draining board, he felt the hard round football shape of her body under all the fur.

“I see. Owners threw you out onto the streets, barefoot and pregnant, did they? I can’t say that I blame them.”

She simply sat down, lifted up a front paw and began washing it with an air of smug superiority.

Snape brewed fleabane potion and sprayed the furniture and all three cats, then added extra fish and chicken to the shopping list.

Three days later, Persephone (as he had christened the new arrival) was not waiting for him in the kitchen for breakfast. When he raised an eyebrow, Minerva stretched and jumped down from Snape’s armchair. She led him to the airing cupboard, where he found the white cat curled around four ginger-and-white kittens. He stared at their tiny, squashed and sightless faces, sighed and cast cleaning and warming charms on the bath towels.

oooOOOooo

The bespoke potions business was not an easy market to break into. It seemed that every witch with an OWL in Potions who needed to make a little money working from home had put ads in the _Prophet_ and the _Quibbler_. Snape’s experience and qualifications counted for little when everyone knew of his Death Eater past. Unable to find a proper job, he was reduced to brewing questionable aphrodisiacs and contraceptive draughts for businessmen wanting to hush up their affairs with their secretaries.

“I’m sorry,” he said, surrounded by bills and receipts, “We’re going into the red. I can’t claim Muggle unemployment benefit without revealing that I own the house, and _that_ will bring to light the fact that I’ve never paid rates or council tax. You lot are going to have to catch your own rodents and birds.”

He expected Minerva to understand, but was a little startled when Crookshanks arrived two hours later, struggling somewhat with a freshly killed chicken. He was grateful for the contribution but it did not go far between one hungry human, three adult cats and four rapidly growing kittens.

“You’re supposed to be the Head of the most illustrious school of witchcraft and wizardry in Britain,” Snape said, throwing the chicken carcass and giblets into a cauldron with a carrot, an onion, a stick of celery and a couple of bay leaves. “Why are you hanging around an impecunious wizard and a load of freeloading felines?”

Minerva wandered across the room, her tail in a graceful sine wave. The view of her bum always made him feel slightly uncomfortable, as if she had caught him peeking up her robes to see what colour her knickers were. Not that he had ever indulged in such childish behaviour even as a schoolboy. Of course not. Although any opportunity to investigate the colour of Remus Lupin’s boxers would have – no! He mentally smacked himself round the head. _Bad Severus!_

Minerva was mewing at him again. He irritably poured a couple of pints of water into the cauldron, cast a heating charm and set it to simmer.

“Now what?” But there was something urgent in the way she latched her claws into the hem of his robe and tugged. “Oh, very well.” She immediately crouched, staring up at him with earnest golden eyes. He automatically opened his arms and caught her as she leaped, then he felt the familiar inside-out tugging of side-along Apparation.

Minerva climbed onto his shoulder and gently batted at his ear with a paw, guiding him towards a large building, from the rear of which he could hear the barking of a couple of small dogs. A hand-written sign on the wall declared that this was the “Sunnyside Animal Shelter – Compassionate Re-homing Centre for Cats and Dogs.”

“What the devil d’you think you’re playing at, Minnie?” Snape muttered out of the side of his mouth, casting a quick notice-me-not charm over the cat. “Unless you want me to leave you here? We should have brought that litter of hell-spawn – ow!”

She steered him into a wooden building which held tiers of cages containing cats of all sizes and colours. Snape looked at them: black, ginger, brown, grey, tiger-striped, and tortoiseshell, from kittens to ancient warriors. Minerva stared fixedly at one pen, prodding him towards it with little jabs of her paw.

The cat was one of those long, sleek, elegant oriental types, silvery-grey in colour, with pale blue-grey eyes. It would have been a beautiful animal had it not been filthy, smeared with blood and painfully thin.

“Excuse me,” called a middle-aged woman, bustling across the room and wiping her hands on her overall, “We’re closed! You need an appointment to view the animals. This one has only just arrived and he needs to be treated by the vet and neutered before he’s ready to go. We have to do a home-check before you’d be allowed to adopt one of our – ”

“Obliviate,” Snape muttered and she frowned, looked at her wristwatch and hurried off again. Snape opened the cage. The silver cat regarded him morosely, hunched in the far corner. “Come along, Minerva thinks we ought to get you out of here.”

The cat’s ears pricked. It stood up and limped to the doorway of the cage. Snape gently picked it up and it snuggled into his arms, making a small sound that in a human would have been a stifled sob. Snape said, “Hold on, Minnie,” and Apparated them all back to Spinner’s End.

Crookshanks snarled at the new arrival. Minerva bashed him around the head. Crookshanks went out in a sulk. The silver cat crouched by the fire, trying to look small and unassuming.

“Are you stuck like that,” Snape asked, “Or are you hiding in your animagus form because there’s still a price on your head?” The cat regarded him mournfully. “You were very lucky that Minerva tracked you down when she did; do you realise what happens to cats before they get rehomed from animal shelters?” The cat twitched and tucked its tail more firmly around its rear end.

Snape brewed healing potions, with special reference to cat anatomy. Then he had a bowl of chicken soup for supper, gave some to the new arrival and watched as Crookshanks brought in a wood pigeon from the nearby allotments and tried not to listen to the crunching noises as he shared it with Persephone and the kittens.

oooOOOooo

Snape’s temper was not improved when he almost fell over the large cardboard box on the front doorstep. He had been woken at one in the morning, by the next-door neighbours packing the contents of their house into a large and smelly diesel van. He had put up a silencing charm, but lay awake for hours gazing at the reflections of the headlights on his bedroom ceiling. Now he stared at the box and the sheet of paper attached to it by a strip of duct tape.

“Deer sir, I no you keep cats and can you have kitty, sheba and puss coz mum sez shes gonna drawn thum coz wee kent tek thum wiv us coz of us goin a bit qick. Frum Tracy.” 

“Sod it, I already have eight bloody cats that I never put my name down for,” Snape muttered as he picked up the box. It mewed and something heavy shifted inside it. “Kitty, Sheba and Puss, how very - cute. Welcome to the Snape home for the bewildered.”

He opened the box and groaned. Kitty – or Sheba or Puss – gazed up at him out of round green eyes while Puss cleaned her ears and Sheba purred.

“I gather that none of you originated from the Sunnyside Animal Shelter. Nor are you a trio of innocent, feline virgins.” He gently poked the one who looked most like a Kitty in her bulging tortoiseshell side. “How many have you got in there?”

When he carried the box into the house, Crookshanks came to investigate with a distinct swagger. Persephone looked disdainful and wandered away. The silver oriental cat watched with unblinking eyes and Minerva purred.

oooOOOooo

Two weeks later, Severus Snape found himself the proud carer (and unpaid servant) of twenty-two cats. The black and white one, whom he had declared to be Sheba, produced three kittens, Puss, the brown tabby, had four and Kitty, tortoiseshell, also four. No wonder their owners had not wanted to take them. Snape suspected that the three females had had previous litters taken away and drowned; by the way they defended them from all comers. Spitting harridans, demanding milk and food, inhabited every corner of his little house. Crookshanks acted as if he had sired the lot (maybe he had) and the silvery cat climbed onto Snape’s knee for the first time and curled up on his lap. Snape automatically ran his hand down the animal’s sleek flank.

“Draco, I’m bankrupt,” he sighed. “I’m going to be reduced to fishing in the canal and raiding allotments after dark if this keeps on. I suppose the Ministry confiscated all your family’s money when your parents died.” The cat gave a little shudder. “Sorry. You and Minerva both mean a lot to me, you’ve been true friends and never lost faith in me, but I simply cannot afford to run a cats’ home.”

The silver cat opened one blue-grey eye and peered up at him. Snape winced as the grey tabby climbed up his leg and balanced on his bony knees, staring at his face. Then Minerva leaned down and mewed softly into Draco’s silky ear. Then both settled down, side-by-side, and purred. Their heavy warmth against his thighs and stomach lulled him to sleep.

oooOOOooo

“Oh no,” said Snape, opening the back door. The grey tabby sat with her tail wrapped around her paws. Next to her was a strange cat, so densely black that it appeared to suck in the dull, wintry sunlight. “Twenty-three bloody cats! I give up.” He stalked back into the house, pushed Persephone and a kitten off their perch on a dining chair and sat down, leaning his head in his hands. “I cannot keep you all, don’t you understand that? If I conjure food for you, I’ll deplete my own magic and need even more food as fuel. I’m damned if I’ll be reduced to stealing. I used to be a professor at Britain’s foremost school of wizardry and witchcraft. I used to have a degree of pride.”

The black cat walked into the house. Crookshanks sprang to attention, marched up to the stranger, stopped, sniffed and turned away, his body language oddly subdued. The black cat fixed Snape with a penetrating green gaze. Snape stared back. The skin prickled over the back of his neck. “Are you using Legilimency on me?” he demanded, incensed. The cat stretched and kept on stretching, upwards and outwards, until a slim wizard with black hair stood on the hearthrug.

“Would I dare?” Potter asked. “Hello, sir, how are you?”

“Thoroughly pissed off and outnumbered by cats,” Snape groused.

“So I see.” He seemed to be struggling to control his laughter. “Professor McGonagall told me that you’ve found Draco.”

Snape waved at the silver cat.

“What are you going to do, turn us both over to the Aurors?”

“Don’t be a dunderhead, sir. I want to offer you a job.”

“As?”

“Potions consultant for one of my businesses; the twins and I are buying Slug and Jiggers. And I also need someone to manage my business portfolios.” Potter shrugged. “Think about it.”

“I’ve thought,” said Snape, trying not to sound too desperate. “Do you like cats?”

“Fortunately, yes. I even like unemployed former Potions masters.” There was a glint in the green eyes, something feline and inscrutable, that Snape certainly did not remember from Potter’s schooldays. Potter smiled at the grey tabby, who elongated and Transfigured into a tall, severe witch with her hair in a bun.

“Fine,” snarled Snape, “Saint Potter turns up and you happily turn back; never mind that I kept urging you to go home for the last eight weeks.”

Minerva McGonagall leaned to plant a quick, dry kiss on his cheek, as if he had not spoken.

“Severus, dear, do stop being a pain. Of course I can go home now Harry’s here to look after you and the cats. I shall be at Hogwarts if you need me.”

Snape waved at the silver oriental cat.

“Go on then, you might as well change back too. Traitor.”

Draco Malfoy uncurled from the armchair, a picture of feline grace and insouciance.

“Did you mutter something about a job, Potter?”

“Probably. If you’ve got half your father’s business acumen – ”

“No, Potter, unlike my father, I chose the winning side.”

Potter grinned.

“I’m living at Grimmauld Place at the moment. There’s plenty of room, and loads of doxies and mice and god knows what else living in the cellars, and gnomes in the garden.”

“Sounds cool,” Malfoy said, stifling a yawn. “If you’re a cat. London, you say?”

“Hm-mm. Nightclubs. Restaurants. Shops. Diagon Alley.”

Malfoy nodded and sauntered out. The wretched green-eyed brat turned to Snape and held out a hand. “Professor?”

Warily, wondering what the hell he was doing, Snape took it in his. Somewhere he heard a cat purring.


End file.
